How a Film Festival Plans to Run Its Entire Operations on Zoho

Ever try to run a film festival? Me neither. But if you had to do it, would you try pulling it off without a CRM application? Probably not.

Well that’s what happened last year for the first ever Napa Valley Film Festival. The entire event was produced without CRM. The coordination was a process of looking up spreadsheets, Google Docs, and sharing documents via DropBox. It caused a lot of confusion and overworking that they want to avoid this year with a move of all operation management onto Zoho, said Carrie Markham and Ben Mahoney, the Administrative Director and Director of Operations, respectively, for the festival.

Customizing CRM for a festival

The Napa Valley Film Festival’s coordination effort is massive. Markham and Mahoney are looking to use Zoho Creator to build an application that integrates all the various elements and departments of the festival such as development, marketing, venues, wineries, operations, sponsors, volunteers, filmmakers, and film programming. Everyone needs to be coordinated and in sync.

I met Markham and Mahoney at the Zoho user conference, Zoholics in Burlingame, California. They were there to make sure that Zoho Creator could help them build applications and forms that would integrate into or from the CRM without duplicating any effort. Plus they wanted a solution that would allow them to customize every aspect for their unique needs, and eliminate the need for any data reentry.

The festival happens the second week of November every year. This year it’s November 7-11th.